The present invention pertains generally to information management, and more particularly to a system and method for storing and accessing a Computer Aided Design (CAD) object model in a tool neutral persistent form.
Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools assist in the design of mechanical parts and assemblies by allowing a designer to produce 2- and 3-dimensional (2D/3D) virtual models of the parts/assemblies. Often during the design process, a designer will want to associate a design note that describes information such as the reasoning behind a particular design choice, a reminder to add or modify an aspect of the model, or a note to another designer who will be viewing the note. Also during the design process, it may be desirable to save certain views of the model (and associate design notes to those views) and/or alternative design models for a particular part/assembly for later retrieval. Such CAD tools may be integrated with or accessed by a collaboration tool which allows multiple networked users (who may be remotely located from one another) to simultaneously view and modify parts/assemblies that are loaded into the collaboration session.
In the current state of the art, all information associated with a particular CAD model of a part/assembly is entered, stored, owned, and retrieved only via the particular CAD tool used to create the model. However, there are many reasons why it would be advantageous to have the ability to access the CAD model data without using the CAD tool. One example is that some of the information stored in the CAD model data may be useful to other non-design engineers. For example, managers, customers, or other engineers not involved in the design of a particular product may be interested in accessing the design notes associated with a particular product design in order to understand the reasons for certain design choices. For these parties (who would otherwise have no reason to use the CAD tool), it would be desirable, due to expensive CAD system licensing considerations, to have the ability to retrieve the contents of these design notes without having to enter the CAD tool environment.
Another example of a reason for accessing CAD model data without entering the CAD tool environment might be to prepare a bill of materials for a completed product design. The CAD model data of a completed design might already include manufacturer""s part numbers, which could be accessed and quantified to generate a bill of materials to produce the product. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that numerous other examples of reasons for desiring access to articles of information stored in a CAD Model database from outside the CAD tool exist.
Accordingly, a need exists for a way to capture, store, and retrieve CAD model data in a tool neutral form that allows any tool to access (and modify where appropriate) the CAD Model data created from within the CAD tool. It would be desirable if changes were made to the CAD Model data for the CAD tool to also be able to recognize the changes.
Another problem with current CAD data modeling is the inability of current CAD tools (or any other type of tool) to cumulatively capture the incremental build-up of information over time that is associated with a project, including the design choices and reasoning behind those choices, problems encountered during the design and the resulting solutions to those problems, and the design alternatives explored and the reasoning behind the choice of designs. In other words, what is needed is a way to capture and track the functional xe2x80x9cas-designedxe2x80x9d aspects of a product rather than the xe2x80x9cas-builtxe2x80x9d configurations of the end product that the prior art CAD tools capture.
The present invention is a system and method for capturing, storing, and accessing CAD model data in a tool neutral persistent form, thereby allowing access to the data by any tool via a publicly defined interface and allowing the clear incremental build-up of information across the entire process using various computer-based applications. Information is represented in a form that may be presented in different ways.
The present invention preferably includes a CAD Model object model which captures and stores various object models containing articles of information and their associated relationships in an object model database. Each object model includes information and relationships that are accessible via a publicly defined interface. In one embodiment, when an object model is saved to the object model database, various types of articles of information contained in the object model, along with their relationships to other articles of information, are saved in separate relational database files associated with the articles of information. Applications accessing the object model database merely use the defined object model interface, which results in the automatic separation and storage of data type objects in a tool neutral persistent form.
The invention facilitates access to information by any application via the defined object model interfaces, without regard to which application created the objects. Thus, there is no xe2x80x9cownershipxe2x80x9d of the data by any application, including the tool that created the data.
The invention also facilitates sophisticated queries on the object models to extract interesting information from the totality of stored information. The invention is advantageous for many reasons, including the ability for multiple people with different roles to access and extract the information in ways that are meaningful to their role. In addition, because the object models are stored in a tool neutral form, information can be obtained from the object model database without requiring the user to use a specific application tool and incurring expensive licensing costs associated with that tool.